Food Lover's Companion

The New Food Lover's Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst is an invaluable resource for noders who node about food. Mine is the revised third edition, published in 2001, and boasts that it contains "comprehensive definitions of nearly 6000 food, drink, and culinary terms". And indeed, when I want to node any vaguely food-related item, this is where I go first. It was a good buy at $21 Canadian dollarettes; it's 700+ pages long, and besides the huge list of definitions, includes tables of equivalents, substitutions, conversion charts, seasoning suggestions, frying temperatures, smoking points of oils, a list of consumer information sources, pictures of cuts of meat, a large bibliography, and much much more. It's not an exhaustive resource, but it's an excellent starting point.

You can see the traces of my book in many of my nodes, and I find the second edition woven through the internet too, for example at epicurious.com or foodtv.com, where it forms the basis of the food dictionary.